Exploring AR - Augmented Reality

Lori Tyler

Exploring AR - Augmented Reality

Lori Tyler

Mathematics Education

As a mathematics teacher, I have always tried to be focused on teaching for conceptual understanding vs. the traditional calculational understanding that makes math so boring and confusing for many students. I am not sure if I completely understand the full impact that Augmented Reality can have on teaching and learning mathematics, but I am willing to learn. I found a really useful website called Two Guys and Some iPads and explored the AR examples they had posted/reviewed. I developed an iPad professional development seminar for some math instructors at Wilkes Community College a couple years ago and after reviewing this website, I now realize that I had used some AR apps without even knowing it. Go figure!

Explain Everything

Explain Everything is an iPad App that allows one to record video and audio along with "writing" on the iPad. Basically, a teacher can create a lesson and explain steps to solving problems. One can pause the video to work out problems and then press play to see solutions worked out. To "implement" the AR experience, you export the video/audio to DAQRI where students can then access the lesson in AR. This practice makes it interesting and exciting to students.

Of course, you do not have to make it a AR experience; that is, you can just create the lesson in Explain Everything and students can access your account through their iPad.

AURASMA - create an Aura to represent data

In mathematics, giving students a data set and asking them to "describe the data" is often meaningless unless the students actually graph the data. Sometimes with extremely large datasets, this may be too cumbersome of an activity. Also, many times students graph data points and use inaccurate axis scales; that is, the scale factor is not the same for both the x- and y-axis.

One activity is to give students a dataset and have them create an Aura with Aurasma. The augmented reality aspect allows students to represent the dataset in various ways so that they can see skewness, true shape, etc. This would allow for rich class discussion about data shape, distribution, scale, as well as various types of data such as nominal, ordinal, or continuous.

Layar - Create AR Triggers on Classroom Walls

[I think of this as similar to QR codes]

Using Layar, one can create an online account for free (expect some advertising banners) and get started by creating a "Campaign". This allows you to upload images (called "Pages") that will be used as a Trigger. Adding buttons to each Page allows students to select it when they scan an image off of the wall and it will take them to to lesson videos, practice questions, summaries, as well as websites, where further exploration can occur. One cool use would be to have the students scan terms or models and then the Trigger can take them to formulas and application examples

Explain Everything

Explain Everything is an iPad App that allows one to record video and audio along with "writing" on the iPad. Basically, a teacher can create a lesson and explain steps to solving problems. One can pause the video to work out problems and then press play to see solutions worked out. To "implement" the AR experience, you export the video/audio to DAQRI where students can then access the lesson in AR. This practice makes it interesting and exciting to students.

Of course, you do not have to make it a AR experience; that is, you can just create the lesson in Explain Everything and students can access your account through their iPad.

AURASMA - create an Aura to represent data

In mathematics, giving students a data set and asking them to "describe the data" is often meaningless unless the students actually graph the data. Sometimes with extremely large datasets, this may be too cumbersome of an activity. Also, many times students graph data points and use inaccurate axis scales; that is, the scale factor is not the same for both the x- and y-axis.

One activity is to give students a dataset and have them create an Aura with Aurasma. The augmented reality aspect allows students to represent the dataset in various ways so that they can see skewness, true shape, etc. This would allow for rich class discussion about data shape, distribution, scale, as well as various types of data such as nominal, ordinal, or continuous.

Layar - Create AR Triggers on Classroom Walls

[I think of this as similar to QR codes]

Using Layar, one can create an online account for free (expect some advertising banners) and get started by creating a "Campaign". This allows you to upload images (called "Pages") that will be used as a Trigger. Adding buttons to each Page allows students to select it when they scan an image off of the wall and it will take them to to lesson videos, practice questions, summaries, as well as websites, where further exploration can occur. One cool use would be to have the students scan terms or models and then the Trigger can take them to formulas and application examples